Geotechnical Computer Aided Assessment
		Leslie Davison

Quest is a self assessment program developed initially for geotechnical engineering students. It can however be adapted to suit any subject area.

Quest was developed by Les Davison at UWE and is used by TLTP project 58, GeotechniCAL. It is a self assessment game which runs under Microsoft Windows and uses the online help system, Winhelp. It is designed to be used over a computer network and is capable of keeping a record of student scores. Although Quest was initially aimed at the teaching of geotechnical engineers, it can easily be adapted to suit other subject areas. Quest asks students a number of questions. Players who do not know the answer to a question are faced with a choice, they can select help or they can guess. If they select help, Quest displays a selected page in a windows help file. If a player prefers to guess the answer, and guesses incorrectly, they then lose a life. Having lost a life, they are presented with the same question again until they select the correct answer. When they lose five lives they have to go back to the star t and answer all the previous questions correctly before they can increase their score. Question writers can, if they wish, provide a hint which will be displayed when an incorrect choice is selected.

Example Screen

Quest is available without charge to academic users. It is capable of displaying bitmap graphics, greek symbols, subscripts and superscripts. Questions are held in an ASCII text file which can be edited by the teacher - a question editor is included. I t is not intended to provide a secure means of assessment. Using a computer network to assess student progress is inherently risky, because it is difficult to provide a means of recording scores while preventing cunning individuals from gaining access and possibly changing the results.

A fixed set of questions can be given to every student, or alternatively random questions can be selected from a question bank. Questions can either be in multiple choice form or, in the case of a calculation, the student simply keys in the correct result . Quest can be dynamically linked to a runtime Excel spreadsheet and this can be used to generate random numbers and conditions for calculation questions. Les Davison Faculty of the Built Environment University of the West of England Bristol E-Mail lr-davis @uwe.ac.uk Based upon an article in Active Learning, No 1 January 1995, CTISS Publications

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